Tragic truth

What do you say to help survivors of a horrific tragedy? Pastor Gino has recently
faced this tough question, not once but twice.

Gino Geraci, pastor of Calvary Chapel in South Denver, Colorado, USA, was serving
as a local police chaplain in 1999 when two young men shot and killed twelve fellow
students and a teacher at Columbine High School, Denver, USA. Gino was later asked
to minister at Ground Zero, New York City, in September 2001, after the Twin Towers
were demolished by terrorist attack.

From troubled youth to police chaplain—Pastor Gino Geraci now himself proclaims
a message of hope to those in crisis, e.g. amid the rubble of the destroyed World
Trade Center.

‘Most likely to go to hell’!

Voted ‘most likely to go to hell’ in high school, Gino’s life
was in a tailspin until God showed him that His Word is true from the very first
verse. ‘In high school I was not just a pagan,’ he told Ken, ‘I
was an antagonist of Christianity. I would find Christians and figure out ways to
humiliate them because I was so anti-Christian.’

Gino explains that his ‘paganism’ grew out of the lack of belief in
absolute truth: ‘When children are left on their own, if there are no rules,
if anything goes, anything will go.’

At the root of his relativism was evolution. He says his indoctrination into evolution
occurred at a very early age. His fourth-grade teacher took him to see the famous
paleontologist Louis Leakey1 at a
fossil dig in the nearby Mojave Desert. That was where Gino found his first fossil,
an experience that began his ‘love affair with evolution’, reinforcing
the idea that there is no God and you can do anything you want.

‘Natural Selection’—Columbine killer’s T-shirt

Gino’s church is about three blocks south of Columbine High School. He was
serving as a chaplain at the county police department when the infamous shooting
occurred. He arrived on the scene as events were unfolding.

Not widely publicized, he says, is that one of the student killers was wearing a
T-shirt that read ‘Natural Selection’. Based on the killers’ own
Web site, Gino says we now know that they were deeply committed to evolution. They
believed that if they shot or killed people, they would be simply scattering their
molecules.

Ground Zero memories

One of the other pastors (along with Gino Geraci) at Ground Zero was Skip Heitzig.
He remembers:

‘The air was thick from the pulverized cement of the fallen towers of the
World Trade Center as the fireman pointed to a cross.
It hadn’t been placed there by any person. Rather, it was formed by the massive
metal support beams that had been violently ripped apart but which now stood as
a seemingly stark reminder of another death. The huge firefighter who showed it
to me was adamant, it was a sign! I was pulling corpses out of this debris. No signs
of life! No hope! Then I looked up and there it was! Five of us stood there studying
it—two FBI agents, a local police officer, the fireman and me.

‘In this solemn place of mass murder and senseless death stood a reminder
of the One who came to bring eternal life. Such a moment couldn’t be more
poignant. What’s more is that this same fireman who showed us the cross was
determined to remove it and preserve it as a memorial. We all locked arms, bowed
our heads and prayed—can you imagine? Four emergency services professionals
and a preacher praying that this cross, and the One who gave His life on one like
it two thousand years ago, would not be forgotten—even here at “Ground
Zero”?!’

Taught to kill

When the superintendent came up to Gino later that day, weeping and asking why it
had happened, Gino blurted out, ‘You have taught our children that
they come from nowhere, and that is where they’re going, and that life is
a point of pain in a meaningless existence. And they believed you.’

The superintendent’s response was shocked silence.

Certainly the shooters were responsible for their own actions, but Gino says this
generation must come to grips with the consequences of living in a Western culture
that has adopted the philosophy that evolution is fact. When evolution is taught
as ‘truth’ in schools, it has real consequences. Of course, students
don’t suddenly wake up one morning and say, ‘Oh, I’m a product
of evolution, I think I’ll go and kill someone today.’ Evolution increasingly
pervades the thinking of the society, from generation to generation. Eventually,
young people no longer have any concept of Christian morality, of right and wrong;
just doing what is ‘right in their own eyes’ (cf. Judges 17:6;
21:25).2

‘The whole evolutionary mindset is breeding a militant atheism and an antagonism
towards Christianity,’ Gino concludes, ‘where any talk about God in
a public setting becomes unacceptable. I believe that we as Christians have to contend
for the faith—firmly and forthrightly reminding people that there is a God.
We must be salt and light in a decaying culture.’

Gino and his church have been actively showing people the clear connection between
evolutionary assumptions and society’s decline. Pastor Gino has talked to
many police officers who see this connection, as they fight evil ‘on the streets’.
They recognize the need for trustworthy information that counters the so-called
‘facts of evolution’. Several police officers have come to Christ as
a result of Gino’s ministry.

Gino explains the biggest lesson from the Columbine tragedy, for him personally:
‘It’s given me a certain boldness and assertiveness, along with a sense
of urgency—we can no longer be squeamish about presenting the truth of the
Bible.’

Ground Zero—different tragedy, same questions

Evangelist Franklin Graham was with US President George Bush during the terrorist
attacks on New York City’s Twin Towers, 11 September 2001. The President approved
Graham’s request to bring a team of pastors to Ground Zero—and one of
them was Gino.

After hurrying to New York, and seeing first-hand the rubble 14 stories high, Gino
was struck by the fact that something so big and expensive as the Twin Towers could
become so worthless so quickly.

There Gino saw a repeat of Columbine—shock and dismay, as the rescue workers
went about the grim duty of trying to find people and recover bodies. People were
asking, ‘Why?’ and ‘Is there a God?’ A recurring theme,
as Gino walked through the rubble and met with officers and firefighters, was ‘What
happens when you die? Where has my loved one gone?’

Although the circumstances of this tragedy were totally different from Columbine,
there was a striking similarity. The tragic truth is that people were trying
to understand the events through the filter of what they had been taught about evolution.
If we evolved from bacteria, what hope do we have?

Do ideas have consequences for a nation?

Gino Geraci reflects:

The Scriptures say that when the righteous rule, the people rejoice. And the New
Testament says that what a person sows, he shall also reap. I believe that the application
isn’t just to individuals but to nations.

If you sow the wind, how can you not reap the whirlwind (Hosea
8:7)? Especially if you’re constantly isolating and then alienating
God from your thinking, from your school system. We have to ask ourselves a very
important question, and that is, do ideas have consequences on a national scale?
And I think that the answer is yes.

Something dreadful is happening. There is a group—even within the Christian
community—which has abdicated the truthfulness of what’s contained in
the Word of God. In other words, they’ve really reinforced the relativism
and said, ‘Well, you know, the Bible doesn’t really mean what it says
and it doesn’t really say what it means.’

Hope for the hopeless, based on a literal Genesis

Gino said his understanding of a literal Genesis ‘definitely helped me’
in ministering to those people, because ‘the account of the literal Genesis
points to a future Saviour who’s going to redeem us’. He often directed
people to the counsel to Christians in
1 Thessalonians 4:13: ‘I don’t want you to be ignorant, brethren,
concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope.’

What is the basis for this hope? Gino continued with these telling words:

‘I really believe that what people are looking for in the most tragic circumstances
of life is an authoritative, credible source of information. That’s why the
attack on the credible, authoritative information in the first 11 chapters of the
Book of Genesis creates such problems in our culture and society. …

‘One of the things that I found in common with Columbine and Ground Zero is
that people in crisis, people in the worst circumstances of their life, want to
know: Is there something real? Is there something true? Is there something that
they can hold onto that’s going to be true in every single circumstance?’

The answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’ We can trust the Word of God from
Genesis to Revelation. This certainty allows us to speak with loving authority
when ministering to people in crisis—a time when people really want
more than ever to know the truth.

Mike Matthews, M.Ed.,is a writer and educator
with extensive experience in Christian publishing. His writings include several
yearbooks on current events and a geography textbook used in Christian schools.
He now serves as a writer/editor at Answers in Genesis–USA.

Columbine: standing for the truth may cost your life

Gino prayed beside one young girl, named Val, who had multiple gunshot wounds and
was lying in a pool of blood. In February 2003 he met her mother, and discovered
that Val is now in college and doing well. Her mother told him that she was so thankful
that God sent someone in her place to be with her daughter. But for a young lady
named Cassie Bernall, the story ended differently, as Gino explains.

‘You know, that young girl, Cassie Bernall? I had the privilege of meeting
with her mother and father, and going to her funeral. Many people don’t know
that a couple of years before the Columbine incident, she was deeply involved in
witchcraft and black magic—stumbling down an occult road. Her desperate parents,
taking the advice of a church youth pastor they contacted, they yanked her out of
her school circumstances and put her in a Christian school. Through the church youth
group and the Christian school, Cassie was exposed to the Gospel and got gloriously
saved. But when her old friends began to harass her, driving by and throwing things
at her house, the Bernalls sold their house and moved to a new home near Columbine
High School, where they decided it would be safe for Cassie to enrol. Cassie became
more and more active as a Christian, carrying her Bible to school every day.

‘You probably know the story that during that fateful day, one of the gunmen
put a gun to her head and said, “Do you believe in God?”? People have
said, well, that never really happened. There were students who survived the incident,
and those students indicated to me that not only did she say yes, but when she said
yes, she looked up. She didn’t just look at the gunman; she looked up. The
forensic evidence shows that when the gunman discharged his weapon, the shot in
her face went upward, because she was facing upward.

‘It’s one of those powerful realities. Not only do ideas have consequences,
but—more and more Christians are going to have to come to grips with this—when
you stand for the truth in a wicked age, sometimes it might involve sacrifice. We
have to be willing to literally live out the consequences of what we believe, that
the Bible is true, that Jesus Christ is the Lord and that He offers the only satisfying
solution to the problem of sin.’

Second ‘conversion’ … to creation

Pastor Gino became a Christian without initially abandoning evolution. He gives,
in his own words, an account of his ‘conversion’ to the authority of
God’s Word, beginning in Genesis, which took place in a so-called ‘Christian’
college where, ironically, his teacher challenged him to accept evolution unequivocally.
He says:

‘One of the most heart-wrenching circumstances of my life was the so-called
Christian community’s commitment to the evolutionary model. I was shocked
at the science department’s commitment—and I do mean commitment—to
the evolutionary model.

‘One of my teachers asked me, “Well, Mr Geraci, now tell me, what came
first, the chicken or the egg?”?

‘And I replied, “Sir, with all due respect, I believe that the Bible
teaches that God created the chicken, and the chicken laid the egg.”?

‘And he said, “Okay, Mr Geraci, Mr Smarty-pants, what came first, the
Bible or the church?”?

‘And I said, “Sir, again, with all due respect, I think you’re
making a gigantic mistake. You see, certainly Jesus authored the church, but the
church didn’t write the Bible. The Bible claims to be an authoritative document
written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The record can’t be true
and evolution true at exactly the same time.”?

‘It was at that point that I fully and finally dismissed evolution.

‘The Genesis Flood book, which had become popular in the mid-1970s, proved
not only helpful, but was the grist that gave me the courage to make this stand.’

Notes

Leakey discovered the ‘Nutcracker man’ (which he called
Zinjanthropus boisei) that was once trumpeted as a missing link, including
by National Geographic. Return to text.